i WAKE UP CURLED UP IN A C.D. WRIGHT POEM

Two dead sparrows assail the pavement ―so much disappearing goes on unregistered,my eyes a tedious and vivacious failure. The girlsin the cafes stroke their leashed peacocks but I press on with syndicated diligence. At the crossing, I pull a screw through my earlobe and collect two drops of blood in the ditchwith all the grenade pins. Grenade, its shapeso much like the fruit they named it after,pomegranate, from Latin pomum granatum,(apple with many seeds), somethingI can harvest and pick from a tree ―a comfortable taste in my mouth, and yes,fruit of the dead, or of fertility, dependingon whose sustenance to listen to. Etymology, from the Greek logia (study of) and eutmus (true)I cannot extract but touch like the feetof my mother’s shrub in Kabul. I open my mouthand marshal the fruit. Please hold me still, I begto the dirt, please touchmy thigh until I’m okay. I’m privilegedenough to think a border as another line to writeon until my shadow briefly spills inkagainst cement. It’s 6:23, the pelt of morninghanging thick above my curves.

Ayasha Guerin. Found installation at the Bärenquell Brauerei, Berlin.

Born to Afghan parents in Germany, Aria Aber now lives in New York, where she is a Writers in Public Schools fellow and MFA candidate in poetry at NYU. Her recent work is forthcoming from Prelude, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, The Margins, and Banango Street. She has been awarded fellowships from Kundiman and Dickinson House. You can follow her at ariamisha.tumblr.com.

Ayasha Guerin is an artist and writer based in Brooklyn. She is a Ph.D. candidate in New York University’s American Studies program and currently a research fellow at the Center for the Humanities. Her art and writing concern themes of the urban/natural, public and private space, ecology, community, and security. She shoots her analog photography on a Canon A-1 that has passed through three generations of her family.